Paranormal America, by Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken, and Joseph O. Baker. NYU Press: 2011. Reviewed: the Amazon Kindle version of the book, $9.76.
Skeptics, the war is lost. In the United States, the paranormal is the norm.
At least that is the conclusion of Bader, Mencken, and Baker, based on multiple surveys that reveal 68% of Americans believe in some manifestation of the paranormal (excluding traditional religious beliefs, such as the intervention of angels and demons in our everyday lives). What do the majority of Americans believe in? UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts and haunting, astrology, the prophecies of Nostradamus, alien abductions, witchcraft, New Age teachings, and so on and so forth. The authors are all sociologists...
Book Reviews
A selection of book reviews by Forum Members.
I originally purchased this book as an impulse buy at the front counter of my favorite bookstore while waiting to check out. it seemed interesting enough despite the fact that I felt I had already studied the subject and the math enough to understand the concept very well, how wrong I was.
This book is a fun read and is full of insight and information that helped me round out and mature my understanding of the famous Einstein equation.
The Authors do not simply stand on the physical and geometric reasons why the formula is correct but go deeper into an explanation of the surrounding physics and the real world applications found in the subatomic realm.
All of these ideas and facts are presented in easy to comprehend terms and ideas and...
As the title suggests, “A Short History of Nearly Everything” is an ambitious project. Bryson starts with the Big Bang and ends with modern era extinction - and in the intermediate 30 chapters takes in the chemistry, astronomy, physics, geology, biology, archaeology and anthropology needed to connect the two. The science itself is interwoven with the lives and personalities of the scientists behind the discoveries - providing a historical measure of the evolution of thought within the given fields and of the social and scientific hurdles that these new ideas often faced.
We learn of country doctor and amateur palaeontologist Gideon Mantell, the rightful first discoverer of dinosaurs, of his betrayal by the man credited with their...
The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy
by Carlo Rovelli
http://www.amazon.com/First-Scientist-Anaximander-His-Legacy/dp/1594161313
This stimulating and entertaining book opened up for me the remarkably advanced science of the Ionian Greeks and the life in their independent cities that first birthed and nourished the scientific spirit. Along with so much else.
Besides being enjoyable to read the book is profoundly thoughtful: reflecting on what is essential in the rational/empirical tradition and the community that follows it, as well as on what was unique in Anaximander's revolutionary contributions. Rovelli has firsthand insight--he's one of today's most creative theoretical physicists. You get the feeling that he has been...
I have always been fascinated by conspiracy theories - the circularity of the arguments, the fact that lack of evidence is often considered by the theorizers as the strongest evidence of all, and the sheer tenacity with which believers cling to their theories.
So when I read a review of Voodoo Histories, I had to get a copy.
Aaronovitch's history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion alone is worth reading the book. From an obscure political protest in the reign of Napoleon III to the antisemitism of Henry Ford to the full-blown persecution of the Jews under Hitler, the wanderings of this little booklet are amazing. Other historical tidbits: the "Oswald did not act alone" or "Oswald was a patsy" theories about the JFK assassination...
“The Grand Design”, written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow is an ambitious book written to plainly and clearly explain the answers to the big questions posed by cosmology and philosophy as posed by recent scientific understanding.
I found the book easy to read and understand. It is certainly clear and concise in its abbreviated explanations of how the universe and life could have come to be, rather than not be. The Authors make great strides to cram much of the understanding of science into a short understandable format, tying together many historical discoveries, axioms and new insights.
Although I found new and exciting ideas and understanding between the covers I also found myself frustrated by a few pronouncements and...
Before reading this book, I was already a nonreligious strong agnostic. I had already figured out on my own that organized religions had no good evidence to support their claims. I was agnostic about the possibility of a deist-type God (one which created the universe but does not interfere in human affairs). The only thing I was sure about was that those who claim to know anything specific about God were either lying or mistaken. But reading this book has inspired me to embrace the term ‘atheist’ instead of ‘agnostic’ or ‘nonreligious,’ which I had preferred in the past.
Dawkins offers a good argument for doubting even a deist-type God. He calls his argument ‘The Ultimate 747,’ which basically turns a creationist’s argument against...
Michael Shermer’s newest work is a keen edge in a world of dull blades. Finally someone has come along and written on this subject providing actual scientific basis and biological evidence pointing to Man’s never ending struggle with his own brain and its propensity to paint itself into a corner.
Shermer writes in a style that echoes his own brilliant personality and down to earth humanity. He is detailed and thorough and has a list of supporting studies and data that will keep a fastidious reader busy for at least a year.
Shermer’s compassion and humanity comes out immediately in the first few chapters as he out lines his motivations for writing this work through case studies and personal anecdotal experience. True to form Shermer does...
Richard Wiseman. Paranormality. ISBN 978-0-956-8756-2-4 Amazon Kindle EBook, June 2011. $8.99.
Richard Wiseman, as the book bio helpfully tells us, began as a professional magician and segued into psychology. Intrigued by reports of paranormal events and people, he began to specialize in testing and investigating the unknown, the eerie, the weird, and sometimes the downright crazy. He has spent nights in haunted castles, interviewed psychic dogs, attempted to talk to the dead, and probably tried to bend spoons with mind power. The Times of London reports that he is the psychologist most frequently quoted in the British press, and no wonder. Most psychologists are concerned with mundane matters, and so they are comparatively boring...
It is refreshing to read a book about web2.0, or user-generated content or crowdsourcing that is not written by someone goggle-eyed about how it is the best thing since even before sliced bread. This one provides such refreshment in spades: Far from vaunting limitless possibilities and long tails of endless choice, Andrew Keen has written the anti-internet polemic of the (last) decade. Actually he does make a lot of mention of endless choice—it’s just that it is all drivel, so it’s worse than limited choice because who wants to spend their whole life raking through sewage to find a dropped earring?
This reviewer suspected that Keen would have made not a few online enemies with this book, and in briefly searching its title she was not...
Richard Dawkins and the other members of the so-called “Four Horsemen” of atheism base their position on the lack of evidence for the existence of God, and admit that it is possible that God might exist in spite of the lack of evidence. Their position, stated simply (perhaps too simply), is that they see no reason to believe in God, although they do not go so far as to say that God does not exist. Victor Stenger takes this view one step further, and says that science can establish that God does not, in fact, exist.
This book is properly seen as a follow-up to Stenger’s earlier book, Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (Prometheus Books, 2003), in which he examined (and dismissed) the...
This reviewer tends to get a little bit squirm-ish each time she spends time on a book which is exposing some combination of shenanigans and cognitive deficiencies--as Bad Science does pretty well--when she simultaneously reads stuff like "Includes a brilliant, shocking and previously unpublishable new chapter" (about Matthias Rath, a prominent ARV drug denier), and "The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller" on the cover. A more honest analysis of anything like this should bring a little more understanding of why this all happens, for which various authors could start to look quite close to home (In other words--the profit motive and marketing just gets everywhere, don't you know . . . ).
Ben Goldacre makes a whistle-stop tour of...
"The probability of an outburst or increase during [calm, mild] weather, I believed to be heightened on holidays, Saturdays, Sundays, and any other occasions where opportunities were afforded the lower classes for dissipation and debauchery" - unattributed quote by ‘expert' regarding how cholera disproportionally attacks the poor and other social underclasses, in Victorian London.
As strange as this seems to modern eyes, this statement was backed up by scientific evidence, or at least what passed for such in England of the mid-19th century. During this time, the predominant theory for the spread of contagion and sickness was miasma (Greek for "pollution"), that is bad smells and foul air were the causes of disease.
The Ghost Map...
This reviewer has noticed a tendency for books about the second-generation internet to veer towards "everything about it is great" or "everything about it is terrible", with most falling into the first category. The excluded middle is much less popular; perhaps less profitable. She looks forward to "Net 3.0—Just One of Those Things, y'know".
On the cover at least, Clay Shirky’s book appears to attempt to be not completely about various uses of the internet, but more abstractly about social revolution, the future of involvement, and group action truly becoming a reality. First, this is overdone, and second, it is really about things people have done with computers or mobile phones all connected together. An updated new chapter (for a...
Nozick provides a thorough derivation of libertarian philosophy from first principles of logic and morality. This is mostly achieved in the first third of the text, in which the argument is outlined why a minimal state (which affords protection from harm, fraud, theft, invasion, contract breach) may naturally arise, and should ethically arise, even to the contentious (to anarchists) extent of coercing participation out of all of a state’s citizens in order to resource the minimal protection of everyone. Part 2, which is slightly longer, is concerned with arguments against the state having any legitimacy beyond what fits the "nightwatchman" descriptor, and includes a lengthy and complex chapter dismantling Rawls’ theory of distributive...
One of the sub-titles of this book ("Why Equality is Better for Everyone") is a little uninspiring as it hints at some kind of "Can’t we all be nice" outreach. But the content is deceptively methodological.
Ambitious is it is to simplify a plethora of social negatives into one and tie them uniformly to variance in incomes (and ignore all other social strata, incidentally), the authors do this surprisingly well. Their story: Above some income-per-head threshold, social welfare (life expectancy, health, mental health, education, crime, trust, others) no longer improves much, but the more uneven the income distribution gets (which appears to happen as average income continues to rise) the more aggregate social welfare seems to...
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
and Other Clinical Tales
By Oliver Sacks (1985, Harper & Row, 243 pages)
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In the human experience, there is nothing as wonderful, or as strange, as the human brain.
The brain is a remarkable instrument. The brain evaluates, computes, remembers, controls, dreams, recognizes, interprets, imagines, predicts, and performs a myriad of other functions. It is truly difficult to appreciate the capacity and versatility of the human brain.
Curiously, however, one can develop a greater appreciation for the brain when one views the behavior of individuals whose brains are—for lack of a better word—abnormal.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a collection of tales from a...
The Grand Design isn't a bad book, but it seems to coast on the reputation of its lead author. At some point society seemed to agree that physicists are the world's smartest persons, and Hawking specifically was granted the title of the New Einstein.
As a result, the media breathlessly reported Hawking's recent book-tour comments that there is no need for a God to explain the universe as if it provided some new or compelling insight into the matter. Perhaps that was justified given how some readers interpreted Hawking's references to "the mind of God" in A Brief History of Time as expressing some theistic belief.
But once one puts aside Hawking's reputation, The Grand Design is anything but grand.
It's not a bad book; in fact...
Before reading this I presumed this book would primarily be of interest to kayakers. But I wasn't surprised to learn after finishing it that it's considered a classic in adventure literature. A fun read.
This is a tale of human endurance and team psychology. At first I was disappointed in the relatively scant description of the terrain and Amazonian peoples. There is virtually no natural history -- the expedition had no naturalist. They had no time to look around. It was about putting mile after mile behind them... over 4000 miles, millions of paddle strokes. It was grueling misery.
What there was, however, was a detailed depiction of the wrangling of egos that likely plays a role in most intense expeditions. The expedition...
I found this book riveting, an exploration of our ancestral humanity from a perspective I had not really considered fully before.
The author is a Harvard anthropologist and brings his own discipline to bear, along with evidence from paleontology, nutrition, and biology/anatomy.
One of the items I found most compelling was the discussion of how cooking allowed our species to evolve reduced teeth, jaws, and digestive systems due to the reduced need for extensive chewing and digestion in order to extract sufficient calories and nutrition from food. The data cited regarding the amount of usable calories from raw vs cooked foods were very compelling, along with the comparisons to modern apes.
Another interesting topic involved how...
There have been many "histories of English" published over the decades; a quick search using those keywords finds over 1 million on Amazon.com. I myself have read several of the well-respected and well-rated books on the subject. But McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue focuses on issues in the history of the English language that other authors either gloss-over or ignore. While most histories of English describe the differences between Old, Middle and Modern English as basically adding a massive amount of vocabulary and losing a bit of complexity, McWhortner focuses on peculiarities of English grammar that other authors ignore and then explains how and why those peculiarities came about.
Have you ever wondered why we insert...
After reading this book, which was recommended to a friend of mine who wanted to bring me back to Christianity, I am still unconvinced of the divinity of the Bible. Why? Well, the thing is, Feiler does not defend the authenticity of the Old or New Testaments. This book is mostly about cultural identity rather than religious apologetics and Feiler claims that the most influential figure in America was Moses. Feiler’s novel is more about Judaism’s influence in America, in particular the story of Exodus and Moses, rather than that of Christianity. Whether or not Christianity or Judaism had the biggest influence on the citizenry of America is of no concern of me. What gets me is that someone gave this book to me as a way to convert me...
Bill Bryson set out to ask, How much do we really know about William Shakespeare, and how confident can we be of our knowledge?
Bryson bills himself as a journalist, not as a historian, and yet the question he faces is one common to those who study history. How certain are we of our facts? In the case of Shakespeare, there are a few things that we know for certain. There are things that we know with a high degree of probability. There are things we can reasonably infer. There are things that are more likely true than not. There are things that are more likely untrue than valid. There are things that are almost certainly false. There things that are legendary. There are things that are speculation. And there are things that...
Leviathan is a political philosophy book written by the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes. It has been influential to thinkers throughout the centuries from Adam Smith, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, and John Locke to John Steward Mill and Leo Strauss.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes makes the argument that man cannot be at peace unless he is governed by a strong central ruler. Through the book, Hobbes attempts to describe the proper role of sovereigns, subjects, and the Church and the consequences of diverting from those roles. One of his main argument is that each man has unlimited liberty and has right to everything and that this condition, which he calls the condition of nature, brings about conflict between others and creates a condition...
The website Fark.com is always entertaining. Everyday, it gives links to actual articles of dubious quality or funny subject matter with a humorous send-up as an alternate title. After ten years or so of activity, Drew Curtis noticed trends in the kind of crap that gets referred to on fark.com. Each chapter focuses on a particular trend, details the most striking examples of each and includes some of the best comments that were made on it on the website.
Media Fearmongering
"EVERYBODY PANIC" Articles about fault lines going to explode any moment now, the presence of bacteria everywhere, shuttles most likely to explode... Media loves to promote fear because it sells copy.
Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article
"Nothing...
This book is written for a general audience, and basically is a review of the history of cosmology from the ancients to about 1992, with an epilogue that discusses the more recent developments such as dark matter and dark energy, which are questions yet to be solved conclusively.
Beginning with ancient myths, the book outlines the history how ancient ideas about the cosmos were examined and improved upon or replaced, and the important figures and scientific ideas along the way. One of the first great scientific achievements was when Eratosthenes of Cyrene measured the circumference of the Earth. Building on this achievement, the ancient Greeks gradually figured out other things like the distance to the moon and the sun. Aristarchus of...
A few weeks ago I attended what amounted to a seminar by Darrel W. Ray, author of The God Virus: How Religion Infects our Lives and Culture. I bought the book, and here is my review:
In The God Virus, the author uses the metaphor of religion as a virus to explain how religious ideas pass from individual to individual and infiltrate society.
The idea of ideas or systems of ideas as "viruses" was first described by Richard Dawkins, who coined the term "meme" to mean a "postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena". They are analogous to genes (hence the similarity in spelling and pronunciation), in that they...
We all know self-styled psychics use "cold reading" to ply their trade, right? But what, exactly, do we all know about CR? Are we sure of our facts? Ian Rowland is. He should be; he's a master practitioner -- a professional magician who for many years has used CR to produce detailed, insightful "psychic readings." And he's eager to tell us all about it.
As he explains in this clear, logical, detailed and very readable book, CR is far more than what most of us think. It has to be since, like a clever, well-executed magic trick, CR can leave anyone who doesn't know how it works completely amazed. (Yes, even you.) And like a good magic trick, once you know how it works, it's not mysterious at all, just very cool.
The book begins by...
This is the best, most concise description of the techniques of critical thinking that I have ever read. If I were teaching a course on critical thinking, I'd use this as the textbook. Topics like the use and misuse of statistical data; how to separate research from writings about the research; ferreting out logical fallacies; junk science; identifying the stakeholders in an issue and their motivations -- are presented clearly, in detail, and reinforced with real world examples.
Many people in the JREF fora are already well familiar with these techniques, but even if you don't need to read this book yourself, it's an excellent tome to recommend to someone trying to find out just what critical thinking is, or for anyone who's tired of...
From the back cover: Atul Gawande examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in this complex and risk-filled profession [medicine].
The author is a general and endocrine surgeon but this is not merely a book of medical anecdotes and case histories. Gawande, son of Indian immigrants, puts forth defining factors for improvement in any aspect of life: diligence, doing right, and ingenuity. There are medical anecdotes and case histories but they are used to illustrate where medicine has failed to live up to its potential as well as where innovative ideas and a certain amount of fearlessness have pushed treatments far beyond what the average doctor would do.
If you are interested in medicine...
Forget "A Candle in the Dark", THIS is the book for your woo friends!
With barely a sniff of that word "skeptic" Natalie Angier has written a book that expresses almost everything we repeat over and over again on the forum. She does it in an entertaining way, while quoting MIT professors and some of the best and brightest minds in science today.
We all know the claim by the "woo" in our lives that science is cold and gives one a jaded sad view of life. But Natalie Jaran not only believes "A rose is a rose is a rose; but the examined rose is a sonnet". And she has the ability to convey that to the average person (or former art major such as myself).
This book sets out to reassure the non scientist that a lot of us have a poor...
I finished this book on the same day that the Point of Inquiry podcast interview with author Simon Singh.
The first nugget in this book is the discussion of science, evidence, double-blind testing, and historical accounts of how medical science has moved forward, ranging from the story of how George Washington was one in a long line of people killed by excessive blood-letting, Florence Nightgale's work on improving sanitation in hospitals, and Dr. John Snow's tracking of the cholera epidemic in Victorian London. They then explain the placebo effect, how it works on tested medicines such as aspirin, and how it works with tested but ineffective remedies.
The authors also set about explaining the history of several alternate...
Thornton describes real days, at a Christie's auction, a crit session at the California Institute of the Arts, the Art Basel art fair. Venice Biennale, ArtForum, Murikani’s Studio, the Turner Prize.
By looking from these seven different angles, the author creates a coherent picture. Although her “ethnography” is often too individual to be helpful in the general overview, describing a tilt of the head or a physical place does sometimes help define the interviewee. If anyone wants answers (at least partial) to nearly any of the art questions that irritate, or wants to see how personal opinions fit into the whole schema of art, read Seven Days in the Art World.
After making and exhibiting paintings for 40 years and teaching art...
My first paranormal book written and researched by someone out of the field but by a history and theory of photography professor. (book could have used some illustrations of the camera, and the process photographers used at that time). Kaplan does a wonderful job pf pulling together primary sources but he does little to analyze them. The real interesting part is how was Mumler able to continue this farce? Was he a believer or a crook at the beginning of his career? Later on it was obvious he knew he was fooling people.
I haven't read a history book written in this style before, Kaplan gives a overview of each chapter in the Intro then each chapter "is" the primary source. First newspaper articles about Mumler's business, then a...
The goal of Peter Irons is to bring the personal element to the Supreme Court cases we know only by "this v. that." He is successful in spades, readers learn the back-story to cases from the first days of the Constitution to 2006, along the way he allows us to see the Justices as real people, not the stogy old white men commonly though of.
This is 531pages of information, told with as much detail as needed, with an element of "People's Magazine" thrown in to keep interest high. Almost too much information is included, yet I found myself spending more and more time on Wikipedia tempted by the need to know more. I wrote the word "Wow" in the margins on more than one page, I even had to keep sharpening my pencil because of all the...
This book has been touted as the “answer” to the recent spate of popular books by atheists, particularly Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens. Hedges, a journalist with the New York Times, was raised Christian and attended Harvard Divinity School. He has written on religion in the United States previously: Losing Moses on the Freeway was about the Ten Commandments, while American Fascists took as its subject the growing influence of fundamentalist Christianity in the US. If anyone can marshal the arguments to rebut the popular atheist works, surely Hedges can.
Unfortunately (for him), however, Hedges can’t. His command of logical fallacies is impressive, but his favourite is clearly the straw man. In fact, this book contains...
This memoir follows a brilliant young woman through the difficult decisions we all must make, career, love, education and family. Harriet knew from an early age that she wanted to be a doctor, at that time female doctors were not unknown, just rare. Rarer still were female Air Force doctors. The story of her struggle to succeed and excel will inspire both genders. Remembrances of the discrimination and sexual harassment will make the reader shudder with annoyance at the stupidity, we must remember that this all takes place in another era, and people like Harriet Hall helped change opinions and policies, making it possible to see doctors as genderless occupations.
I want to point out one comment she makes about the “lipstick...
I have always loved fantasy, from classic Winnie the Pooh, the Wind in the Willows, Bilbo Baggins to the modern sword and sorcery writers. For me the master of all is the genius writer Terry Pratchett who wrote the Discworld series.
I also loved science. From a boy reading about the Galaxy and space travel, the famous Junior Woodchucks Guidebook from the Duck boys to science in university as an adult.
So when those two join forces the result must appeal to me. The Science of Discworld is two books in one. One part is written by Pratchett and contains a story about the wizards of Unseen University in Ankh Morpork. Their new machine in the high energy magic building creates an universe by accident, and the wizards go on...
I guess I have an affinity for books with covers that depict people painting themselves into corners. After reviewing Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) some months ago, I'm back with a review of When Good Thinking Goes Bad, by Todd C. Riniolo, professor of psychology at Medaille College.
This book is divided into three parts. The four chapters in Part I introduce critical thinking and some of the techniques used to apply it to the evaluation of claims. The author also stresses the importance of applying critical thinking not only to evaluating claims (such as paranormal and pseudoscientific ones), but also in everyday life. For someone who is new to skepticism and critical thinking, it's a good introduction to the basics: taking...
Shermer prefaces Why People Believe Weird Things with a brief anecdotal tour of his pseudoscientific and mystic encounters along with an introduction of what his book will entail. Science and skepticism is defined, not as an object, but as a process of discovering provisional and tentative truth. Science and pseudoscience is contrasted by their methods of change and manner in which ideas are supported. Ubiquitous logical fallacies and problems in pseudoscience are presented and defined.
Pseudoscientific concepts and superstitions are exposed as products of natural phenomena, chance, group think, and dogmatism. Near death experiences, alien encounters, and cult-like behavior are among the issues explored. The evolution and Creation...